A New Look : From Social Register to Social Work for Junior League

With cavities and aching gums, child after child walks through the doors of the Children’s Dental Health Clinic in Long Beach, one of the few places locally where poor families find subsidized care.

“(The parents) have to concentrate on food, clothing and shelter,” said Junior League volunteer Doris Robinson, who helps oversee the volunteer effort at the clinic. “After that’s taken care of, they have no money or insurance.”

The dental clinic is one of seven community projects Robinson works on with the Junior League. After working all day as an elementary school counselor, Robinson volunteers at the Junior League, coordinating programs to promote literacy, teach values to schoolchildren and assist the homeless.

“The Junior League doesn’t party,” Robinson said. “We work.”

The Junior League, one of America’s oldest women’s charity organizations, is undergoing a dramatic transformation, said Julie Siebel, a doctoral candidate in women’s history at USC who is researching the Junior League for her dissertation.

Two decades ago the league was an exclusive group that invited the white, moneyed wives of important men to join. Although the group supported charities in the city, it was primarily a club for the social-register set in white gloves and pearls.

A generation ago, Robinson’s mother probably never would have been accepted into the league because she is black. Neither would member Marilyn Sagehorn’s mother, a second-generation American whose family came from Japan.

But the league is changing. In Long Beach, the league is recruiting minority women and in the past decade has seen its membership change from a group of homemakers to one of career women. Today, roughly 10% of the Long Beach league’s 230 members are minorities and 60% work outside the home. Of this year’s new members, about 75% work outside the home, said Long Beach Junior League past President Ginnie Wilky, who works full time as a school librarian.

The transformation is occurring not just in Long Beach, where members celebrated their 60th anniversary in April, but throughout the nation.

“The Junior League tends to be more committed than other women’s charity leagues, which usually concentrate on debutante balls and society teas,” Siebel said.

In Washington, for example, the league has unofficial lobbyists persuading lawmakers to help pregnant teen-agers and victims of abuse.

“The league is a half-step behind the cutting edge on women’s issues,” Siebel said. “(It) crops up where you’d least expect.”

As society changed, so did the Junior League. During the 1970s, the league began losing members, as more women joined the work force and fewer could pursue daytime volunteer projects. “(The league) had to respond to market changes,” Siebel said.

Now, projects are organized around work schedules and meetings are held at night.

To combat the image of exclusivity, women are no longer invited to join. Instead, Junior League members help women find the sponsors they need to be members, Wilky said. If recruits fulfill the requirements of training and education, they automatically become members after the first year.

Members pay $100 annual dues and donate $200 in goods for the league’s annual rummage sale. They also volunteer an average of two hours a week on projects, although some members, like Wilky, spend as many as 20 hours a week on league business.

The changes have cost the league its place in high society: In the early ‘80s, the Social Register dropped the Junior League from its roster, said Liz Quinlan, director of communications for the National Assn. of Junior Leagues.

“And that’s just fine,” Quinlan said. “It reflects just where we want to be going.”

In Long Beach, the league founded its oldest project, the Children’s Dental Health Clinic, in 1936 and has since helped thousands of children. The league also works in the public schools, where $15 million in funding cuts in the past two years have made their contribution critical, said Richard Van Der Laan, public information officer for the Long Beach Unified School District.

“They do what we’d like to do but can’t afford,” he said, pioneering a number of projects in art, fire safety and values training.

“The white gloves and tea. Who has time for that anymore?” said Sagehorn, a seven-year member and art teacher who helped found a school for homeless children at the Catholic Charities’ Long Beach Family Shelter.

The league also opened a toy-lending bank at the shelter for resident and neighborhood children, run by member Pam Flores, who keeps track of hundreds of toys and dozens of children.

“Pam doesn’t just give kids toys,” said former shelter resident Lynn Wronosky, 27, of Long Beach, who returns to the shelter every week to borrow toys for her two children. “She gives them attention and creates a family atmosphere. Her daughters play with my kids.”

Like many Junior League members, Flores and Robinson keep volunteering because they want to make a difference. “You’ll always have those people who believe there’s more to life than money,” Robinson said. “They give so the homeless person has a home, so the runaway has shelter, so a child has dental care.

“Their reward is in the giving. That’s what we do it for,” Robinson said. “That’s why our society survives.”